Over the years, I occasionally come across Linux installs that take an extraordinary amount of time to operate, in general. While I am encountering this now with LM 19/Cinnamon, this has occurred with various distributions, not just LM.

Yesterday evening, somewhere around 9PM, I started this install of 19 from scratch, including the torrent download and disc write. A finished install usually eats up, say, an hour. My guess is that this particular install might finish before midnight, a day later. This is an especially egregious example, true, but I have to ask.

Why does this happen only sometimes?
What can I do about it?
How can I test what is eating up the CPU cycles, or whatever else is going on?

Conditions:
- the Pentium laptop is a few years old, yes, but other distributions and installs aren't bothered by that
- I only install Linux on USB sticks and that is not a problem in the USB 3.0 era, either
- the problem exists on my desktop box, too
- I test each USB stick and this one is typical, about 30Mb/sec

you should not let the computer perform for 24 hours during installation. something is quite wrong and letting it do an installation for 24 hrs is out of the question. there's no telling what is wrong unless you open a task manager or top to see if cpu is hanging at 100% or if installation is actually on hold waiting for downloads. could be you connected to the internet and updates are going at a slow connection from mint mirrors. or maybe your wifi is not connecting. did it occur to open system monitor to check download speed or to see what processes are running?

I am almost finished installing Xfce overtop of the first install. Same hardware and Internet connection, different install disc. It is taking a normal amount of time. (It just completed and took about 1.25 hours.)

I still have no idea why the first install took so long and operated so slowly after rebooting into Cinnamon.

11:39 power on
11:51. Something else completed, had to set up the partitions. The unallocated area will be ext4 /backup
11:52:30. Time zone
Install now running
Mouse has to be moved every minute to prevent Screen Saver from locking up
the install.

12:07:45. Install Finished, Restart now.

60 seconds later it said remove FOB

So, looking at the Stop Watch, it took 29 minutes to get to "Install Done" message.

The Acer 5253 is very representative of what most folks will have to work with.
Anything better costs double the money. If I continue the upgrade with 8gB RAM ( max it can take )
and the planned SSD, I will easily double the costs of what this laptop was worth new....

the 7200 rpm 1TB drive in it now? it won't stay, that is planned for another project.
but, I wanted to verify just how long a typical install takes.

15 minutes might be doable on a much faster machine, with 8gB RAM

I do remember that when I did a fresh install on my ASUS with 500gB SSD, 12gB RAM,
that the install went much faster than I remembered it taking the very first time when I used a USB DVD for the install.
the TP500L does not have a DVD optical drive, it is a thin/mint FlipBook

I gave you a recent example of a really bad one and I still have no idea why this happens or what, if anything, I, as a user, can do about it.

This isn't my first time in this rodeo. I have experienced this with various distributions, off and on, for over a decade. If I made another attempt using the same install disc and USB stick, it might even work as expected. I just never can tell.

How much Ram is in the i5 machine you speak of? the Acer 5253 only has 2gB RAM and the DVD is very slow.

6GB. I bought it new about 6-7 years ago on sale for about £350 (sterling) so I've never thought of it as an expensive machine. In USB2 only, HDD not SSD. Installation is via USB. I've got a decent Fibre Broadband connection and the machine is wired so that will help with downloading updates during the install.

I was genuinely surprised that an install could take that long. Other than Vbox installs (which are similarly quick) I've not had the need to install linux on a machine very often - I think I'm on my 4th full install.

Edit to add - I've just compared the benchmarks for the Acer's AMD chip vs the i5-2430m - yes the latter scores quite a bit higher.

in general, if the machine has less than, say, 2Gb of ram,
and / or the CPU is less than 2GHz and / or there is an older style HDD:
then any combination of those - can make the Installation Very Slow indeed.

if you are booting an Disk instead of an usb stick - then that can be somewhat slower, as well.
& there can even be issues with the usb port & that usb stick, as well.
plus, if you have a slower-than-normal internet connection - - that can affect the installation time, as well.

there is just so many variables, to be considered, as to why that One Time was So Much Slower, than is normal,
and Only One of Them, has to be non-normal & suddenly your Installation is now over an Hour .. ..
- - an Hour is about all that you should need to install any operating system,,
but those updates, are another matter, that often can take any number of Hours to achieve.

Please edit your original post title to include [SOLVED] - when your problem is solved!
and DO LOOK at those Unanswered Topics - - you may be able to answer some!.

But that is precisely my point. If this happens every single time, then I would junk the old hardware. For the vast majority of the time, everything works normally and is satisfactory, under the circumstances.

Only occasionally does an install work this way. It wouldn't be so bad if it was only slow during the install process, but the finished product works slowly, too. Like I said, I installed another LM19 distro on the same media and everything was normal. I have since created another Cinnamon install from the same install disc and it is normal, so far, so it isn't the install media or flash media. And, as I mentioned above, the same thing can happen using my desktop box, so it isn't just my laptop.

I checked using one of the few tools at my disposal and the CPU is not working above 9%, and not much memory is being used, so it's not that.

Someone else has the Acer 5253. I have a 4730Z and it's working normally.

I have described how Linux operates, not how it deals with the Internet. When installing, it is operating from a DVD, taking any downloads into account. When it runs slowly after installation, I described how it is operating independent of anything else.